Mostly About Organized Crime

09/28/2014

The share price of a company's stock often can be manipulated lower through fraudulent means by so-called short sellers, and it's done to the yawning indifference of the Securities and Exchange Commission and other law enforcement agencies as reported by Steven Pearlstein for The Washington Post: "as the nonprofit advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) lays out in a recent white paper, shorts are active in anonymously feeding false and misleading information about their target companies to friendly analysts and bloggers while using social media to attack the intelligence and motives of those who view the company favorably," and "they enlist plaintiffs law firms to issue press releases soliciting shareholders to sue the target companies for securities fraud."

11/07/2013

Tokyo Underworld author Robert Whiting explains in an interview with Bloomberg the pervasive influence the Yakuza has in Japanese society from control over the vice rackets such as prostitution and gambling to infiltration of the legitimate economy through hundreds of front companies involved in real estate and the stock market.

Japanese bank regulators currently are reviewing some of the country's largest
financial institutions after Mizuho Bank Co. allegedly made about $2
million in auto loans to supposed Yakuza members as reported by CNN.

02/15/2012

A recently released report by the RCMP says organized crime groups are behind financial fraud schemes in Canada as reported by Kathryn Blaze Carlson for the National Post: "the Montreal mafia has a history of boiler-room schemes and stock market manipulation, while Nigerian organized crime groups in Ontario have been involved in telemarketing and investor fraud."

Meanwhile, a separate study by the federal government "concludes that the Canadian commercial construction sector is at a moderate to high risk of corruption and organized crime" as reported by The Canadian Press: "a barrage of reports about cost overruns in the construction industy, and its ties to crime groups like the Mafia, has prompted a public inquiry that will soon begin in Quebec."

No surprises here. Now that the problems have been identified for the umpteenth time how about doing something about it, eh?

01/21/2012

Among the rackets for which the Russian Mafia is becoming known is the B-Girls or Bar Girls scam in which a pretty girl seduces a drunk fool, and then racks up his bar tab with phony charges.

Former DEA agent Richard Mangan estimates that "the 'B-Girl' scam represented only 10 percent of the crimes the Eastern European mafia was involved in," and the South Florida group "also has been into credit card fraud, they've been into health care fraud, they've been into drugs, everything from stocks to market fraud to loan sharking."